Stating the Obvious on 9/11

“The Insistence of Beauty” - Stephen Dunn

The day before those silver planes
came out of the perfect blue, I was struck
by the beauty of pollution rising
from smokestacks near Newark,
gray and white ribbons of it
on their way to evanescence.

And at impact, no doubt, certain beholders
and believers from another part of the world
must have seen what appeared gorgeous -
the flames of something theirs being born.

I watched for hours – mesmerized -
that willful collision replayed,
the better man in me not yielding,
then yielding to revenge’s sweet surge.

The next day there was a photograph
of dust and smoke ghosting a street,
and another of a man you couldn’t be sure
was fear-frozen or dead or made of stone,

and for a while I was pleased
to admire the intensity – or was it the coldness? -
of each photographer’s good eye.
For years I’d taken pride in resisting

the obvious – sunsets, snowy peaks,
a starlet’s face – yet had come to realize
even those, seen just right, can have
their edgy place. And the sentimental,

beauty’s sloppy cousin, that enemy,
can’t it have a place too?
Doesn’t a tear deserve a close-up?
When word came of a fireman

who hid in the rubble
so his dispirited search dog
could have someone to find, I repeated it
to everyone I knew. I did this for myself,
not for community or beauty’s sake,
yet soon it had a rhythm and a frame.


This is a long post, which one of you has already teased me about (and rightfully so!). But I’m going to give myself a pass on this one (and hopefully you will, too, and will read through it), because today has been an unexpectedly difficult day. Starting in 2002, I developed my own memorial routine on this day to avoid the public spectacles and photo ops: making a point to block out some private time between 8:45 and 9:15 am to re-open the file that I only open once a year, a file that contains my sacred objects from that day and some of the days that followed; a file whose folder still has the tear-stained scribblings that I wrote on it two days after the attack because I couldn’t find any paper.

But this year has been different in many ways for me. Most difficult is that during an internal office move last year, my sacred file (which I kept at work, because work was so tied into my experience of that day) was misplaced, and the office manager was never able to relocate it. And so I am mourning the loss of those tangible connections to that day in addition to all the losses of that horrible day itself, because they gave me a “rhythm and a frame” that kept the memories arranged and defined, not simply as my own, but as part of a larger collective.

I mourn that day not simply as a concerned friend or acquaintance or neighbor, but as a member of the family of New York, whose own heart was pierced by the sword of those planes when they were thrust into the unsuspecting breast of the city, whose own heart was singed and scarred by the fires that exploded out of those towers, and yet somehow filled all the more with love precisely because it was so filled with grief, as the simple poster in the photograph above that appeared all over the city declared.

I mourn that day as one who waited on the street for those making their way home from downtown, wandering down the middle of the avenues like a refugee column that you’re only supposed to see on the news about places far away.

I mourn that day as one who called friends that I believed could very well be dead, who heard their cheery, unsuspecting voices on their answering machines, who left a strained message and then watched the clock as the seconds and minutes and hours tick by without any response, until the ticks began to sound like church bells announcing a funeral. And finally, finally, the triumphal trumpeting of my ringing phone began the shred the silence, each time announcing a voice that is alive on the other side of the call and calling to say, “I made it out; I made it home.” And then I felt guilty for feeling such joy and relief, because I knew how few other people in the city who had made those calls would have the same experience.

I mourn that day as one who stood on an avenue and watched my local fire company respond to a call on September 12, a day and an age after the attacks. They roared up the street with lights and sirens blaring while pedestrians, one after another, stopped in their tracks to raise their hands: some to form fists of defiance and strength, some to clap in gratitude, some in salutes with their palms over their hearts, and some as shields to cover their mouths, turning their heads away so the firefighters would not see them crying.

I mourn that day as one who stood on the side of the street in the twilight of early evening on Friday, awkwardly holding a ridiculous, cinnamon-scented bathroom candle because it was all the local store had when I rushed in after receiving the email chain about New Yorkers doing a candlelight vigil wherever they were at 7 pm that night.

I mourn that day as one who, while watching the latest news about the recovery at Ground Zero later that night, finally came undone after barely shedding a tear for almost four days, my whole body convulsing for almost an hour with primal sobbing that I had never experienced before and hope never to again; a sobbing that until then I would have thought was ridiculous overacting if I had seen it onstage, that felt as if it would literally tear me apart by the volcano of grief erupting inside me for my people, my city.

I mourn that day as a New Yorker.

So what does that mean? It’s hard to explain beyond what I’ve already said. But isn’t that what art, what poetry is for? Yes, but the poets largely let us down after 9/11. When we needed a new Walt Whitman to write our “When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d” or a Hopkins for our “Wreck of the Deutschland” or a Wilfred Owen for our “Futility,” there was none to be found.

I think Dunn comes closer in his poem to something real in response to 9/11 than most poets. In particular, he notes how New Yorkers, especially those that fancy themselves in the elite, “take pride in resisting the obvious,” and yet find themselves drawn into it against their will. Even cynical, sophisticated New Yorkers had to accept that the obvious forms of beauty (sunsets, etc.) could be edgy if they're seen "just right" in such circumstances, and that even sentimentality, “beauty’s sloppy cousin,” had a place.

But Dunn still falls short. In fact, I am going to argue that only Bruce Springsteen, with his album The Rising, produced a truly significant piece of honest, profound, public art responding to 9/11. He leaves no aspect untouched, and quite simply does not concern himself with the navel-gazing niceties of where the line is between beauty and sentimentality, and whether or how the latter has a place. He just states the obvious, all the sloppy, confused, complex dimensions of human life in the midst of tragedy:

• There is the shell-shocked guilt of a survivor in “Nothing Man;" the confessions of an emergency responder struggling with the dual burden of his own guilt and the adulation of others, which feels false or downright dehumanizing. He not only feels like a nothing man; he wants to be one, not a hero.

• There is the remarkably, dangerously, bold meditation on the possibilities (and perhaps impossibilities) of understanding and even love between American and Muslim cultures, personified in mismatched lovers in “Worlds Apart.”

• There is one of the finest depictions of grief in modern art (of any genre): the extraordinary, subdued, heartbroken lament of someone who is beginning to realize that her phone will never ring with good news from her husband in “You’re Missing.”

• There its counterpoint in “Empty Sky,” where a man awakens gasping with grief as he looks at the empty impression that his wife’s sleeping body has made on their mattress, then staggers into the seductive, understanding embrace of a revenge fantasy.

• There is the surprisingly triumphant title track of a doomed firefighter narrating his experience that day of leaving home, answering the call, and running up the stairs to his death. But instead of the expected imagery of “The Falling” at the chorus, the song switches to what sounds like nothing less than the voice of God, who redefines reality by beckoning him further up from falling to The Rising, from death to resurrected life (“come on up for the Rising;/come on up, lay your hands in mine”).

• And there is the seemingly paradoxical refrain of the final track that every New Yorker instantly understands because every one of them has said it already: “My city of ruins/My city of ruins/come on, rise up!/come on, rise up!”

To listen to that album is to hear what it means to mourn 9/11 as a New Yorker; and the irony that it was written by the patron saint of New Jersey will be lost on nobody who knows New York. Though, as for that, when it comes to 9/11, all the bridges and tunnels disappear into our common river of loss and grief.

But Springsteen comes through where almost all others have failed, I think, precisely because he knew what Whitman and Hopkins and Owen knew, what Dunn comes so close to knowing but cannot quite accept. Sometimes the obvious cannot, should not be resisted, precisely because the temptation is to do so. Sometimes the insistence of beauty is a distraction; sometimes the obvious is the only thing that is real, the only thing that matters. Sometimes we just need to admit:

Baby, once I thought I knew
Everything I needed to know about you:
Your sweet whisper, your tender touch.
I didn’t really know that much.
Joke’s on me, it’s gonna be okay,
If I can just get through this lonesome day.

— Bruce Springsteen, “Lonesome Day,” The Rising

I Love NY

Sonnet XVII - Pablo Neruda

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way
than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

For my money, this is one of the greatest love poems ever written. In a perfect world, everyone would get a chance at least once in their life to read this poem to someone and really mean it as their own words, and for that someone to hear it, believe it, and feel the same way. And even more to the point, I’ve heard that Neruda wrote this poem to his wife. Perfect worlds aside, that should give pause even to the most hardened cynic about the possibilities for deep, passionate, lasting love within a lifelong relationship.

Well, we do not live in a perfect world, and many people do not get to read this poem in such a way, and many people who do read it have no business doing so. Like much of Neruda, the unblinking ferocity of its passion and the delicateness of its beauty have been appropriated by those who have no appreciation of its true power or value, like someone who steals a van Gogh and hangs it in their bathroom. Hopefully, I am not one of them when I suggest that this poem, with the object of its beloved unspecified, may help unlock what we mean when we claim to love New York.

“I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz, or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off,” he begins. As beautiful as those things are (the perennial beauty of a red flower, the eternal beauty of a red precious stone, the fleeting beauty of sparks from a fire), as popular as they are as metaphors for love, they have nothing to do with what he feels for her. Those are all things that are superficially beautiful, easily recognized and appreciated by any who gazes upon them. Any idiot can appreciate the beauty of a blossoming flower; his love is far more profound, far more intimate, far more rare: “I love you as the plant that never blooms but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers; thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance, risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.” It is a deeply knowing love, a love that knows and treasures what the casual gaze of the world never gets to see, indeed could never see because it cannot be known outside of the relationship.

It is also, ultimately, a mysterious love, an inexplicable one. What plant never blooms but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers? What certain solid fragrance is he talking about? What exactly is the place between the shadow and the soul? None of it really makes sense. Which, of course, is the point: “I love you without knowing how, or why, or from where.” We spend so much time trying to quantify love, classify it, evaluate it, deconstruct it, test it. But love is not a theorem that can be proven, nor an argument that can be won. Love is either real, or it is not. And its reality can never defined or explained, but simply known and experienced.

There are lots of outward things to appreciate about New York: its energy; its size; its cultural depth and breadth and diversity; its history; its power; its unique opportunities. We may greatly appreciate and value those things; they may even be the things that initially drew us to New York and first excited us about it, like the first flushes of desire and infatuation in a budding relationship. But they are not reasons that explain our love for it; reasons are never enough, and there are always good reasons not to love (it’s crowded/dirty/inconvenient/expensive…).

Our love is much simpler and straightforward than that. We love because it is the only thing we can do; our love itself becomes part of who we are: “I love you because I know no other way than this: where I does not exist, nor you…” The city, in a very real way, becomes a part of us, to the point where we no longer think of ourselves in purely individual terms, but as part of a larger intertwined whole without ever losing our individuality.

I have lived in this city for over a decade, and while that relationship has had its ups and downs, I have never once desired to leave (though I have had some good reasons to do so), never once grown tired or indifferent to its hidden beauty, never felt unappreciated or that I did not belong or that I did not have something to offer, and never been able to adequately explain why that is so. All I know is that, in a very real way, I would not be me without this city, and I don’t want to be.

The city has been the witness and companion and partner in my life that has been with me and for me in my greatest joys and heartaches, hopes and disappointments. No, it does not replace having what Neruda himself had in terms of a person with whom to truly share your life and being. But it is still, undeniably, a loving relationship. And perhaps I know that to be true the most because I don’t seem to be able to explain exactly how, or when, or from where it is so. I just know that it is.

The Humanity of the City

"Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" (excerpts) - Walt Whitman

1

Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes! how curious you are to me!
On the ferry-boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose;
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence, are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.

2

Others will enter the gates of the ferry, and cross from shore to shore;
Others will watch the run of the flood-tide;
Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east;
Others will see the islands large and small;
Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high;
A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them,
Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring in of the flood-tide, the falling back to the sea of the ebb-tide.

3

Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt;
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd;
Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d;
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood, yet was hurried;
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships, and the thick-stem’d pipes of steamboats, I look’d.

5

What is it, then, between us?
What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?
Whatever it is, it avails not—distance avails not, and place avails not.

7

It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,
The dark threw patches down upon me also;
The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious;
My great thoughts, as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre? would not people laugh at me?

It is not you alone who know what it is to be evil;
I am he who knew what it was to be evil;
I too knitted the old knot of contrariety,
Blabb’d, blush’d, resented, lied, stole, grudg’d, Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak,
Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant;
The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me,
The cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous wish, not wanting,
Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness, none of these wanting.

9

It is not you alone, nor I alone;
Not a few races, nor a few generations, nor a few centuries; It is that each came, or comes, or shall come, from its due emission,
From the general centre of all, and forming a part of all.

“The real New York is disappearing.” New Yorkers seem to enjoy few things more than debating how much their city is in decay, how much its true character or nature is under assault and how much ground it is losing in that fight. The old New York small business owners are being driven out of business by the invasion of suburban-style box stores and bank branches. Wealthy white families who have moved into Harlem are calling the police to complain about the noise from the long-standing drum circle concerts in Marcus Garvey Park. And in a city with thousands of family-owned Italian restaurants, an Olive Garden lurks seductively in the corner of Times Square, beckoning tourists astray with its sordid proffering of unlimited breadsticks. An Olive Garden! At least the prostitutes and drug dealers of years past weren’t trying to pass themselves off as legitimate businesses, and at least some of their customers had the basic decency to feel ashamed for patronizing them.

The truth is, though, that New York has always been disappearing in this way. One of the world’s most notorious slums in the 19th century, the Five Points, was centered at what is now essentially the courts and government office buildings around Centre Street. The Upper West Side, whose sidewalks are now synonymous with groups of small children and big dogs, was once so equated with roving gangs of street toughs that Bernstein could simply use the title West Side Story and everyone knew what would be depicted. Greenwich Village has gone from the headquarters of the bohemian revolution to a place for the bridge-and-tunnel crowd to go bar-hopping. Even amongst the apparent botoxed unchangeability of the Upper East Side, about all that’s left of the once-massive German community around 86th Street in Yorkville is the Heidelberg Tavern.

And if Walt Whitman stood at the dock for the Brooklyn Ferry today, he would be confronted with many more unfamiliar sights than familiar ones. While Whitman was alive when the Brooklyn Bridge was built, he never could have imagined it would lead to the death of the ferry; the only crowds thronging the ferry landing these days are lining up for ice cream (though he would no doubt be pleased to find his poem inscribed on the landing itself). It would not have occurred to him that the only masts of ships that he would see would be the tourist attractions at South Street Seaport. He would be surprised by the new skyline, defined by the Empire State Building, the Woolworth Building, the Chrysler Building; he would not be surprised to still catch himself looking for where the Twin Towers used to define that skyline, the way many of us who lived here before 2001 sometimes still are.

But Whitman would be able to deal with that, I think, because he understood that what is unchangeable about New York, what defines its character and identity and authenticity, is its humanity, not its physicality. Neighborhoods may change, buildings may disappear, but human nature doesn’t change and how human beings relate to one another rarely changes. What is constant about New York is its social character in how it deals with human nature, and I think it is in that character that its greatness lies.

What resonates the most for me in New York is that we have a holistic concept of our character here. Most cities have some version of trying to emphasize what is beautiful or successful or impressive about them and downplay the rest. In New York, we obviously celebrate the ultra-successful: the entrepreneurs, the artists, the money managers, the political leaders. But New York genuinely values its shadow side and the people who embody it by having visibly “knitted the old knot of contrariety”: the misanthropes and the eccentrics on the sidewalks and subways; grumpy old men in diners; little old ladies who run you down with their shopping carts; rude cab drivers with a death wish; hustlers hawking knock-offs on Canal Street or playing three-card monte on side streets.

Why? Because they ensure that New York is one of the most truly human places on earth: a place of astounding achievement and spectacular failure, a place of soaring hopes and grinding despair, a place where the personification of graceful beauty may sit next to the personification of awkward ugliness on the subway. There really is nowhere else in the United States, and precious few in the world, where all the different facets of humanity are brought together so closely for so much of the time.

That is why the underlying threat that most concerns New Yorkers is homogenization. We don’t want to be a place where only the best is on display, where everything is designed and therefore expected to be convenient and sanitized and predictable. New York’s adamancy about that helps us acknowledge and what Whitman admits: it is not upon us alone that the dark patches fall. It is very easy to forget that, especially in places whose whole ethos is designed to deny the presence of dark patches. But New York helps us remember that all of us experience those times when the best we’ve done seems blank and suspicious, our greatest thoughts as meager and laughable, that none of the dark things about human nature are wanting in any of us. It is not any of us alone, and each of us comes from all and forms a center of all. I think that’s why New Yorkers have such a strong sense of shared identity, why people love this city with a love that I’ve never seen the equal of anywhere in the world (and I’ve traveled and lived widely). Yes, we have all kinds of subsets of race and class and neighborhood and baseball team affiliation. But all of us are New Yorkers, because all of us are human. And New York is nothing if not deeply, broadly, fully human, and I can't imagine it won't stay that way.

What is it, then, between us? Well, there's always something. But whatever it is, it avails not.


P.S. - my e-mail address for this blog is tenniswiththenetdown@gmail.com, a reference to a quote by Robert Frost: “writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.” So there’s a bit of irony here, given that Whitman is often known as the father of free verse. But while Whitman can be rambling and narcissistic at his worst, at his best I think he suggests that tennis with the net down is a whole different game that only looks easy to play until you try it.

Dreams

“He Wishes For the Cloths of Heaven” - William Butler Yeats

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half-light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

New York might be called a city of dreams. Most New Yorkers were not born in New York; they have made their way here for a reason, and those reasons are often described, one way or another, as dreams. Many have dreams dream of coming and making their fortune on Wall Street, a fortune that will secure their future and enable them to live the good life. Many dream of coming and garnering fame: not simply fame as celebrity (that’s what L.A. is for), but fame as renown, one who is respected and admired as a master of the craft. And more generally, we all come to New York with a dream of the lives we will live, of the people we will become. In New York, and in America in general, a dream is usually thought of as a goal, an aspiration, a vision for the future that we are trying to create.

But this city can be hard on those kinds of dreams. Sometimes it just grinds them into the mud like a child’s lost mitten on the side of a slush-lined road. But more often, it slowly unravels them over time like an old blanket: pulling a thread here, snagging a corner there, until we’re left shivering at night wondering why we can’t get warm, unable to see how thin and threadbare the whole thing has become. How many office temps are “really” singers still working for that big break, and are convinced that they can’t take a permanent job because any day now they’ll get signed to a show? How many waiters rattle off ten minutes of memorized details on the ingredients and cooking method of specials because they are “really” actors who spend the rest of their time memorizing lines for an audition scene that they’ll probably never actually perform? How many corporate associates are still staring at their computer screens at 11 pm on a Friday night, certain that things will change once they make partner, pretending not to notice how life right now is running through their hands like water while waiting for the “good life” that always manages to stay about 3-5 years around the corner?

Perhaps we need to be more careful about our definition of dreams, which is where this poem is helpful. At first, it just sounds like a particularly good love song. What lover hasn’t wished (in far less exquisite words) for “the heavens' embroidered cloths, enwrought with golden and silver light, the blue and the dim and the dark cloths of night and light and the half-light”? Only the full-ranging beauty of the cosmos, in all its shining colors and haunting shadows, all its blinding power and quiet mystery, is a worthy gift for the one they love; failing that, what is one to offer?

Well, he has an answer: “I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; tread softly because you tread on my dreams.” And this is why this poem is not just a particularly good love song. You see, he’s not talking merely about goals and aspirations and vision for the future. For Yeats, dreams are not something that we are working towards; they are something we already have. They are the springs of love and desire and fear and insecurity and insight and reflection that run deep within us and well up in our sleep and visions. They are the fragile tapestries that reveal our deepest identity in all of its jumbled beauty and ugliness, which we do our best to hide away in the dark chambers of our hearts, far away from the probing and damaging light of the outside world. And so they are the only thing comparable to the whole canopy of the cosmos that we have to give to the one we love.

It is no accident that the slogan for this city has long been, simply, "I Love NY." We don't simply live here; we have a relationship with it, a love affair of sorts that goes through the emotions of any relationship: joy, grief, frustration, desire, disappointment, and satisfaction. But it is the very uniqueness of that love that can cause us great problems. We have to learn not to expect more from the city than it is able to give. New York never treads softly, and while we may be able to achieve our goals and realize our aspirations, we cannot trust it to safely hold our dreams, our deepest identity and being; goals and aspirations are difficult enough.

No, there are some things that only another person can be trusted with; though as for that, there aren't very many of them, either. One of the most common refrains in this city is how hard it is to find "a good man" or "the right woman." And what that really means is someone who is able to fully give what you need and, perhaps even more important, take what you give; someone you can connect with at the deepest level of our being; someone you can really trust to bring down into the dark chambers of your heart, see what's there, and both understand and appreciate what they see. To unveil the blue and dim and dark tapestries of our true self there and gently lay them at another’s feet is perhaps the most profoundly vulnerable and profoundly loving gift we can offer. Will the other trample them into the dirt in contempt? Tear them with their heel in careless indifference as they turn to go? Or refuse to even come in to look in the first place, lacking the capacity or the desire or the courage to accept such a gift? Any of those results are possible, even likely, from most people; the temptation, then, is to begin believing that, like the city, there is nobody out there who is really capable of making this kind of connection, of being trusted with this kind of gift.

But here, I think the city actually can be trusted: with 8 million people representing the whole spectacular spectrum of humanity in this place, there's at least one of them who's capable of receiving the gift of each of us. At least one of them, when you spread out your dreams at their feet, will not run away or try to change the subject or stare at you in confusion. They will step forward in wonder, and gently and slowly walk across the delicate cloths, bending down to take in every shimmering color and dusky shadow as you wait, holding your breath. And finally they will straighten up, and carefully step back towards where you are watching anxiously. And they will look at you and smile softly, and then breathe out those words you have been longing to hear: “I love it," they will say. No, there aren't very many of them. But you only need one.

Intimacy

"Acquainted With the Night” – Robert Frost


I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
A luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.


It is unusual to be alone in the city. During the day you flow with the tide of humanity that goes down into the subways and buses and rushes back in the evening. At virtually any hour of the night, you can walk down most streets and see at least a few people here and there, heading out or heading home, or just sitting on the stoop of a building, unwilling for the night to end just yet. And even in what would seem to be the deadest time, when the pale light of the early morning is just beginning to appear, you can see two different worlds of people passing by one another: the bouncy gait of a jogger starting her day, loping past the man who has almost made it home, still wearing last night’s clothes.

But it is not unusual to be lonely in the city. One of the great ironies of city life is how easy it is to be so physically close to people without having any real interaction with them. On a crowded subway car, our hands come together on the same pole, our bodies and faces press closer together than a couple engaged in a slow dance; yet there is a distance between us in which we often do not even acknowledge the other’s presence. And so we can be as completely isolated in the heart of the city, in a crowd of people, as we can by “outwalking the furthest city light.”

Proximity and intimacy are two different things; in fact, proximity without intimacy actually highlights our loneliness. And while the city may magnify that paradox, it is true of human relationships wherever they take place. It is it in the awkward silence of two people who don’t know each other recognizing the essential emptiness between them after the initial thrill of a one-night stand. It is in the awkward silence of two people who know each other too well eating dinner together, recognizing the essential emptiness between them in the hollowed-out shell of what was once a living relationship.

The conventional interpretation of this poem says it is about Frost’s struggles with depression. And that makes sense. But on a more basic and universal level, it is about the elusiveness of intimacy. It is never hard to be close to someone in the city; but true intimacy with someone is another matter. We spend a lot of time wandering in search of it, though when others seem to question what we’re doing or why, we drop our eyes, unwilling to suffer the embarrassment of explaining. We stop short in our steps when it seems that someone might be calling us back to them or even just saying goodbye, only to realize that they’re not talking to us. Walking at night, under the moon, is supposed to be a time of intimacy, we’re often told by more sentimental poets. But the reality is that it is usually is a time that is “neither wrong nor right”; it is simply another night.

And yet most of us keep wandering. The question, then, is why we wander: is it inertia, or is it with a purpose? Frost’s vision is of aimless wandering, of looking without searching, of being acquainted with the night but nothing else. But most of us are doing more than that. Intimacy, a true and deep connection with another, may be elusive, but we are actively searching for it. And no matter how time or circumstance seems to be conspiring against us, we expect that one day, we will find it. One day, we will be acquainted with more than the night. One day, the moon will not just be a silent clock telling us another lonely night has come, but will be a fruit to be picked and savored with an intimate companion over and over again, “till time and times are done”:


“The Song of Wandering Aengus” – William Butler Yeats


I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.